Barack Obama, the Joker, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia Gerry Canavan Marquette University, [email protected]

Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette English Faculty Research and Publications English, Department of 1-1-2010 Person of the Year: Barack Obama, the Joker, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia Gerry Canavan Marquette University, [email protected] Accepted version. "Person of the Year: Barack Obama, the Joker, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia," in Politics and Popular Culture. Eds. Leah A. Murray. New Castle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010: 2-13. Publisher Link. © 2010 Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Used with permission. Gerry Canavan was affiliated with Duke University at the time of publication. 1 Gerry Canavan Program in Literature, Duke University 917 Burch Ave. #2 Durham, NC 27701 336-253-7135 [email protected] Person of the Year: Barack Obama, the Joker, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia for Hollywood Politics (ed. Dr. Leah Murray) How then does one explain the fact that capitalist production is constantly arresting the schizophrenic process and transforming the subject of the process into a confined clinical entity, as though it saw in this process the image of its own death coming from within? Why does it make the schizophrenic into a sick person not only nominally but in reality? Why does it confine its madmen and madwomen instead of seeing in them its own heroes and heroines, its own fulfillment? —Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus If 2008 had a person of the year, it had two: Barack Obama on the one hand and Heath Ledger’s Joker on the other. Each in his own way was a spectacular image made flesh—the spectacle of hope, change, and progress against that of disaster, dread, and death—and each in his own way embodied his moment. The Dark Knight, a cultural sensation, shattered records, including $67.2 million in a single day, the biggest single- day opening ever; the largest opening weekend, $150 million; $100 million in two days, $200 million in five days, $300 million in ten days, and $400 million in 43 days—all records, the last achieved with twice the speed of the previous record holder.i The film’s total gross has now crossed a billion dollars worldwide after its release on DVD and a subsequent re-release in theaters in January 2009.ii For its part, the Obama campaign, aided by an acute awareness of mimetic branding and viral marketing, and fueled by unprecedented use of online fundraising and social networking tools, set its own monetary records throughout the primary and general election season, including $133 million dollars in the first quarter of 2008 and $150 million dollars in a single, record- smashing Septemberiii that included $10 million dollars in one night after Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican National Convention.iv In all Obama had millions of donors, with approximately half that number giving less than $200. Obama’s stump speeches regularly drew crowds of 50,000 people or more, with 33.6 million people tuning in to watch a campaign-paid infomercial a week before Election Night.v By the end of the election the Obama campaign had collected 13 million email addresses, a million cell- phone numbers and half a billion dollars from three million people over the Internet, the vast majority in increments of $100 or less.vi All this, and he won too. 2 At first glance the sheer fact of this paradox appears ludicrous, but we cannot escape it. It was the power of this juxtaposition that gave Australian artist James Lillis instant fame when he chose to parody Shepard Fairey’s iconic HOPE campaign posters (vaguely reminiscent of the iconic “Che” print) with JOKE, a image of the-Joker-as- Obama that circulated quickly on the Internet and is still (as of this writing) available as a T-shirt.vii How can the country that elected Obama on a rhetoric of "hope" and "change" at the same time revel so completely in the Joker's pure negativity and aura of death? What can explain the appeal of The Dark Knight to countless numbers of Obama supporters, donors, and volunteers, many of whom must have gone from working for the campaign during the day to seeing the film that night? How could any cultural moment be attracted to such polar opposites simultaneously? This chapter will argue, through reference Deleuze and Guattari’s category of the schizophrenic, that despite their surface differences the Obama campaign and The Dark Knight’s Joker in fact drew their tremendous popular appeal from a common source: a projected desire for a revolutionary reconfiguration of the conditions of life in twenty-first century American capitalism. SECRET IDENTITIES AND MISSING BIRTH CERTIFICATES Almost two decades ago, in Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology, Richard Reynolds noted the essential passivity of all superheroes, who take on the role of foil or antagonist against the active engine of plot in their stories, the figure who formally speaking is the protagonist: the villain.viii This has never been more true than in The Dark Knight. Naturally, Batman is the nominal hero of this film, but in this, more than any other film in the franchise—befitting the first movie in the series to forgo his name in its title—he is neither the film’s star nor its object of primary interest. Indeed at times he is something of an afterthought to a war of wills between the Joker and Harvey Dent, able to be returned to a place of honor in his own franchise at the end of the film only because Dent has the bad luck to be half-doused in gasoline. This is the Joker’s film, and had been ever since its predecessor (Batman Begins [2005]) ended with its tease of the Joker’s “calling card.” The Joker is whom we have come to see, the Joker what we have been waiting for, the Joker who generates nearly all of the pleasure of the film. So we must be careful to resist readings of The Dark Knight as an uncomplicated, one-to-one mapping of the major players in the War on Terror into comic-book terms. That is to say that the Joker is not best understood as “a terrorist,” though characters in the film call him such repeatedly. The wishful thinking of some right-wing commentators aside,ix the film is not a grand apologia for the Bush presidency, despite the presence of torture and fanciful domestic spying subplots and its apparent Jack Bauer ethos of legal exceptionalism. It is, instead, a kind of macabre pageant, a celebration of the violent revolutionary excess of the Joker himself that is legitimized by the disciplining presence of Batman—delight in destruction made ideologically safe because it is (a) not “real” and (b) eventually (if nominally) “punished.” More so than even Jack Nicholson’s turn in the iconic 1989 Tim Burton film, this is a film that lives and dies by Heath Ledger’s performance. The film’s advertisers were surely aware of this when they crafted the “Why So Serious?” viral advertising campaign dedicated to his performance, as well as the various Alternate Reality Games and online promotions crafted towards uncovering images that tease the Joker. This is why the 3 frenzy of media speculation that greeted Ledger’s death immediately translated into free advertising for the film. However, the lingering aura of Ledger’s death has a consequence: it significantly deforms the audience’s ability to read this film correctly. That Ledger died just after filming—that initial reports blamed the role itself for his (as it turned out, incorrectly assumed) “suicide”—in some ways threatens to transform The Dark Knight into a kind of snuff film. As an unnamed “studio insider” told Variety after news of the actor’s death broke: “The Joker character is dealing with chaos and life and death and a lot of dark themes,” one insider with knowledge of the campaign said. “Everyone is going to interpret every line out of his mouth in a different way now.”x It was in this context that early media reports in the wake of Ledger’s death inevitably turned to a cryptic statement from Jack Nicholson, the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman: “I warned him.”xi Or, as David Denby put this point in his review of the film in The New Yorker: When Ledger wields a knife, he is thoroughly terrifying (do not, despite the PG-13 rating, bring the children), and, as you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering—in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism—how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss.xii This question—which Denby “can’t help wondering,” which dominated both public and critical reception of the film—is precisely the question that we are not supposed to be able to ask of the Joker. The film is quite clear that the Joker has no history, and can have no history. This is why he tells multiple versions of the story of how he got his scars depending on whom he hopes to terrify, and if the point isn’t clear Jim Gordon is sure to drive it home: “Nothing. No matches on prints, DNA, dental. Clothing is custom, no labels. Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint. No name, no other alias...” The Joker’s violence cannot be located in an identity or a personal subjectivity. It must originate from and out of nothing, out of the shadows of Gotham itself; that is the entire point. Precisely the opposite could be said of Bruce Wayne, who is all history—who builds his own assemblage of gadgets, disguise, gravelly voice, and affectless persona precisely because his father and mother were murdered in Crime Alley, whose entire life grows out of and is a (frankly insane) response to that singular event.

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